Inspiring an Open Source Model of Curriculum Development

As the Open Educator community begins to define what it wants to be, I thought a deeper look at the open source philosophy/metaphor should first be undertaken. In this spirit I share these selected Excerpts from "Cooking Pot Markets: an economic model for trade in free goods on the internet"

by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,

(The full text can be found at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/)

Torvalds [the creator of Linux] says, " [t]here are lots of advantages in a free system, the obvious one being that it allows more developers to work on [Linux], and extend [Linux]." However, "even more important" is that making Linux free brought "in one fell swoop ... a lot of people who used it" - not just reporting problems, but playing a crucial role in the further development of the system. Torvalds notes that a single person or organisation "doesn't even think of all the uses a large user community would have for a general-purpose system" - so the large user base of Linux was "actually ... a larger bonus than the developer base."

***

"On the Internet - indeed in any knowledge economy - it is not necessary for everything to be immediately traded into "real world" money. If a significant part of your needs are for information products themselves, you do not need to trade in your intangible earnings from the products you create for hard cash, because you can use those intangibles to "buy" the information you want. So you don't have to worry about converting the warm feelings you get from visits to your cat Web page into dollars, because for your information needs, and your activities on the Net, the "reputation capital" you make will probably do.

"The cyberspace 'earnings' I get from Linux," says Torvalds, "come in the format of having a network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return. And that kind of network of trust comes in very handy not only in cyberspace." As for converting intangible earnings from the Net, he notes that "the good thing about reputations ... is that you still have them even though you traded them in. Have your cake and eat it too!"

 

***

There is, here, the first glimpse of a process of give and take, by which people do lots of work on their creations which are distributed not for nothing, but in exchange for things of value. People "put it" to the Internet because they realise that they "take out" from it. Although the connection between giving and taking seems tenuous at best, it is in fact crucial. Because whatever resources there are on the Net for you to take out, without payment, were all put in by others without payment; the Net's resources that you consume were produced by others for similar reasons - in exchange for what they consumed, and so on. So the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast tribal cooking-pot, surging with production to match consumption, simply because everyone understands - instinctively, perhaps - that trade need not occur in single transactions of barter, and that one product can be exchanged for millions at a time. The cooking-pot keeps boiling because people keep putting in things as they themselves, and others, take things out."

***

"But on the Net, a cooking-pot market is far from altruistic, or it wouldn't work. This is thanks to the major cause for the erosion of value on the Internet - the problem of infinity [21]. Because it takes as much effort to distribute one copy of an original creation as a million - and because the costs are distributed across millions of people - you never lose from letting your product free in the cooking-pot, as long as you are compensated for its creation. You are not giving away something for nothing. You are giving away a million copies of something, for at least one copy of at least one other thing. Since those millions cost you nothing you lose nothing. Nor need there be a notional loss of potential earnings, because those million copies are not inherently valuable - the very fact of them being a million, and theoretically a billion or more - makes them worthless. Your effort is limited to creating one - the original - copy of your product. You are happy to receive something of value in exchange for that one creation.

What a miracle, then, that you receive not one thing of value in exchange - indeed there is no explicit act of exchange at all - but millions of unique goods made by others! Of course, you only receive "worthless" copies; but since you only need have one copy of each original product, every one of them can have value for you. It is this assymetry unique to the infinitely reproducing Internet that makes the cooking-pot a viable economic model, which it would not be in the long run in any brickspace tribal commune."

***

The cooking-pot model provides a rational explanation for people's motivations to produce and trade in goods and services, where a monetary incentive is lacking. It suggests that people do not only - or even largely - produce in order to improve their reputation, but as a more-than-fair payment for other goods - "ideas" - that they receive from the cooking-pot. The cooking-pot market is not barter, as it does not require individual transactions. It is based on the assumption that on the Net, you don't lose when you duplicate, so every contributor gets much more than a fair return in the form of combined contributions of others."

***

"Reputations, unlike ideas, have no inherent value; like money, they represent things of value, as proxies. Reputations are crucial to seed the cooking-pot and keep the fire lit, just as money is required to reduce the inefficiencies of pure barter markets. However, reputations require a calculus and technology for efficient working, just as money has its price-setting mechanisms today.

The cooking-pot model shows the possibility of immense value being generated through the continuous interaction of people at a numbing speed, with an unprecedented flexibility and aptitude towards intangible, ambiguously defined goods and services. The cooking-pot market already exists, it is an image of what the Internet has already evolved into, calmly and almost surreptitiously, over the past couple of decades.

The cooking-pot model is perhaps one way to find a rationale for the workings of the Internet - and on the Net, it finds expression everywhere."